So here’s a story, the punchline for which, still raises my blood pressure. Several years ago my grandfather died. I wasn’t particularly close with him, but always thought fondly of him and decided I should head down to Florida to honor him and celebrate his life. I even secured a Bart Starr jersey (he was a lifelong huge Packer fan… I know…) that I would wear to the service (this is how big of a person I am). The trick was that I had a memorial service back at the church at which I was one of the pastors that I needed to officiate the day after my grandfather’s service in Florida. Normally in a situation like our lead pastor would step in for me (because she’s just that kind of gal), but she was away on a much-deserved vacation. So I had to be very strategic: I would fly out Wednesday, go to my grandfather’s memorial service Thursday, fly back that afternoon and be home Thursday night in time for the service I was officiating on Friday. Easy.

So I take off on time from Minneapolis to fly to the purgatory known as the Atlanta airport. When I get there my flight is delayed because of grass fires in Daytona. As it seemed the fires were clearing a bit, a wicked nasty storm rolled through Atlanta delaying and ultimately canceling flights, mine included. Let’s just say the airline handled this situation poorly, was utterly helpless and showed no grace or even effort to someone just trying to get to his grandpa’s funeral. By about midnight, I realized I was not getting there, since the next flight out from Atlanta would get me to Florida long after the service would end. At this point it was time to just turn around and go home. As I booked a flight back to Minneapolis, I was a frustrated and sad customer. Without getting into details, they could have gotten me to Daytona but they simply chose not to. Because I was not going to reach my destination in time, I asked if I would at least be refunded for the ticket. “Sorry sir, we don’t do refunds for ‘acts of God‘”.

I literally said some to the effect of, “Acts of God? Do you really want to go there with me? An act of God would actually be a little grace, here, a little understanding, a little compassion, don’t you think?” I was livid. The fires and the storm were not “acts of God”. Why is it that we so often refer to such events in this way? I suppose it goes back “the flood”, but wasn’t that part of the covenant that God made with Noah which God would never do again?

As we see in this story, God does not cause the storm, God calms it. The text for today says that a “windstorm arose on the sea”. A more literal translation would read, “a great earthquake [σεισμός, seismos] came about on the sea”. The storm just happened. This was not an “act of God”, it was an act of science. But Jesus gets up to rebuke the wind, to put it in its place.

The NRSV reads that there was then a “dead calm”, but here’s a place where I think the King James gets it’s right. Most translations strip this passage of its poetry and, in so doing, I think its power. It’s just a nice story of Jesus calming a storm. In Greek the text essentially reads, “a great earthquake [tempest is the word used in the King James] came about on the sea”; and then upon rebuking the waves, Jesus creates a “a great calm”. The word for “great” is used to modify both “storm” and “calm”. We move from “a great storm” to “a great calm”. To use a different modifier for “storm” and “calm” strips this passage of its comparative elements, which is, I think, Matthew’s intent with the story. We don’t serve a God of great storms. We serve a God of great calm.

God’s name is attributed to a lot of mayhem (to put it mildly) in the Hebrew Bible, but in the New Testament we see what one could describe as a corrective that: Things change with “Emmanuel, God With Us”. Our God is a God of calm. The “act of God” is not the storm nor is it the calm by itself, but the calm in the storm. While Jesus calms the storm, however, he does so only after chastising his disciples for having little faith. That does not mean it’s not okay to be afraid. There are great storms to be afraid of in this world. But it does mean, that even in our fear we know and cling to the truth that the God we serve is not the God of the storm swirling about us, but the God of calm.

You see, it was in calming of the storm that the disciples were amazed, not in the creation of it. Calming the chaos is much more amazing than creating it. So let’s stop with blaming God when lightning strikes denominational gatherings, and bridges collapse, and earthquakes strike impoverished nations, and hurricanes level a town, and deep freezes shut down a city. We don’t serve a God of storms. We serve a God of calm. May we all dig deeply enough to find the great calm of the Christ even in the midst of life’s great storms.

For those of you wondering about verses 28-34 in today’s reading, stay tuned…

This is one of those passages where Jesus just seems mean. Cold. Unfeeling. He is certainly not pastoral here. I tend to gloss over this passage. I don’t like it. But it’s there. Staring at me with a silent scream, demanding that I listen to it, look at it, and deal with it. I don’t want Jesus to sound this way. I want Jesus to have more empathy and patience for his followers, but when he calls, does he ever say, “Hey, here’s a thought? Have you ever thought about following me? Why don’t you take some time, talk to your spouse, and see if it fits with your family’s needs.” No, the text says, “they left their nets and followed him”. Jesus calls us to leave everything, to make him primary, and begin doing his work right here, right now. I just wish he showed a little more empathy for the bereaved.

In the context of this verse, I’ve often heard the question asked: “What obstacles do you have in following Jesus?” It’s a fair and even good question. For me, the truth is, my family is the first thing that comes to mind. Can we pastors just say that out loud? Were it not for my family I could live this itinerant life as freely as I like and as the Bishop calls. My wandering spirit could roam from town to town, up and down the dial. But, when I drill down into this a little more the truth is my family is anything but an “obstacle”.

They are not keeping me from following Jesus. Not at all. In fact, without them, I don’t think I would know how to follow Jesus. They have been key players in my spiritual formation. I didn’t understand the discipline of patience prior to having children. I lacked self-control prior to getting married. Having a family forces me to live in real intimacy, not some feigned or veiled version of it. They’re like a mirror constantly showing me who I am and what I could become.

The obstacle to following Jesus is not my family. It’s me. It’s my pride, it’s my anger, it’s my arrogance, my impulsiveness, my narrow and idealized views. I wonder if Jesus calls us not to recklessly abandon responsibility, but more so to turn away from ourselves- our false selves, that is. The self that isn’t whole and ends up using others to figure itself out. Jesus calls us to deny our own self fulfilling desires and to rise up and follow him to a whole new way of living. A way of living that recognizes the formative power of God in our lives. That’s what following Jesus is- living a life fully tapped into the formative power of God’s grace. So perhaps the more clear and appropriate question is not “what are your obstacles to following Jesus?”, but “what in my life is an obstacle to the formative power of God’s grace?”

I’m struck in this passage by Jesus’ response to the centurion. It is a rare moment when Jesus something like “Truly I tell you, in no one in Israel have I found such faith” (8:10, NRSV). We often hear Jesus saying things like, “go, your faith has made you well”, but it appears here that one of, if not the most faithful people Jesus encounters in the entirety of the Gospels is this anonymous centurion. The picture I get is a bunch of students in a classroom longing for this kind of response from their instructor. Isn’t this what we all want to hear?

It’s like Ralphy’s dream in the movie A Christmas Story, when his teacher lauds him with honor and praise and his classmates lift him up on their shoulders because of the “theme” he wrote: “In no one in Israel have I found such faith”. And the crowd goes wild… This is the response we all want, perhaps even more than “this is my beloved child in whom I am well pleased”.

Jesus has just finished with three chapters of laying out what it means to be faithful to the heart, not just the letter, of the law, a law which a Roman Centurion couldn’t care less about. And the first person he affirms for their faith is a Roman Centurion. Not just an outsider, but the very expression of the enemy. So the question is “Why does he say it? What is it that the centurion said or did that warrants that response?”

He says it in response to the centurion’s faith in Jesus’ power and authority: “…but only speak the word and my servant will be healed” (8:8). He is certain that Jesus can do this, even from a distance, but why is he certain? Anwswer: Because he understands what power and authority are all about. He then likens Jesus’ power and authority to his power and authority as a centurion. It is here that Jesus gives him, what I would like to call, “The Great Affirmation”.

The Great Affirmation comes in the likening of a Roman centurion’s power and authority to the Messiah’s power and authority. The centurion is not saying that they are equal, but he is saying that as one who has servants and slaves, he understands how real power and authority work. By Jesus affirming this, Jesus is essentially saying that there is something about the context of a Roman centurion’s life that can help form their faith in God to the degree that “in no one in Israel [has Jesus] found such faith”. Jesus does not affirm his faith in spite of him being a Roman Centurion but because of it. It is his work as a Roman Centurion that is the very thing informing the faith that Jesus affirms.

This has to send those belonging to the anti-Rome movement through the roof. Jesus is indeed, not breaking the law, but, breaking the law wide open. This does not exclude or deny Israel but forces Israel to expand its gaze. The Kingdom is no longer defined by its borders but by its center. The question isn’t “are you inside the borders of the Kingdom?” The question is, regardless of where you are, “are you moving toward the Kingdom’s center, which is Christ?” The walls are coming down.

My question is, what does this mean for us, Jesus followers of today, the Church of the 21st century? Do we need to expand our gaze? About whom would it surprise us for Jesus to say, “nowhere in the Church today have I seen such faith?”

Again, we see this running theme of “action” in the Sermon on the Mount. Jesus says near its beginning that he did not come to “abolish but to fulfill [the law or the prophets]” (Matthew 5:17, NRSV), and he finishes the sermon by calling us to take his words into action, not just understand them. Yet, again, we have to be careful, because Jesus is not saying anywhere that we had just better be about a lot of good behavior or else. The “fulfillment” is not in behavior but in the foundation that births, forms, and transforms the behavior. Jesus used a fruit metaphor earlier and he uses a house metaphor here. Just as a bad tree cannot bear good fruit, a bad foundation cannot hold the most glorious of homes. What is at our root, what it is that we build our life on, the condition of the heart, mind, and soul is what shapes how we will live in this world.

The action that Jesus speaks of (good fruit, a home that stands, etc.) is the evidence of a right heart. As fallen humans, we so long to be right with God that we jump straight toward trying to exhibit the evidence of a right heart in order to “prove” it without actually working on a right heart. And when we do this, we produce fruit that looks good, but tastes horrible. And we make houses that look glorious, but cannot withstand a storm. We become like “their scribes” (7:29).

But this is not a license to not be about action. Jesus is clear here: “Everyone who hears these words of mine and acts on them…” (7:24). Jesus expects us to hear the words and act on them. We let the words inside, and these words should do something in us to spur action. We must put them into practice. But what are we putting into practice? Fasting? Not cheating on our spouse? Praying? Not hating our enemy? Giving? Well, yes, all of these things, but not merely these things. Jesus is calling us to do them but to do them in a certain way. He’s calling us to fast but to fast for the purpose of connecting with God rather than putting on a spiritual show. Jesus calls us to do more than merely not hate our enemy, but to seek to love them, pray for them, and I would argue to see them differently. Jesus is calling us to not merely not cheat on your spouse but to see them differently, and particularly for men to see women differently. The action that Jesus is calling us to is to let the spirit of God shape us into this kind of person, not just try to look like one.

Jesus begins his teaching in Matthew this way, and he ends it similarly: Among his last words to his disciples in Matthew’s Gospel are “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you” (Matthew 28:19, NRSV). The call is not to teach people about everything he commanded, but to obey everything he commanded. We don’t make disciples in Sunday School classrooms alone. We make them out in the world, at the office, on the basketball court, in the lunchroom, at the bar, and when we are “at home and when [we] are away, when [we] lie down and when [we] rise” (Deuteronomy 6:7).

In Matthew 7 Jesus commands us to put his words into practice. In Matthew 28, he commands us to teach others to put them into practice. And so we try these practices on as a way of being formed into something- something that (dare I say?) reflects the image of God.

This concludes the Sermon on the Mount. Now we get to see Jesus in action…

This passage destroyed me about 12 years ago. Up until then much of my Biblical foundation lay in a school of thought that is obsessed with what it called “belief”. That is, it’s not about what you do but about what you “believe”. The problem is that all too often “belief” was something which merely manifested itself in an idea that when we die we will essentially be given a theology exam, and if we pass, we go to heaven. If we don’t, well…

Belief got reduced down to mere recitation of doctrine. I had it fixed in me that this is all it took. If you could recite for me that “right” doctrine and say you “believed” it, then you were in. Greg Boyd has said it perfectly many times: “The righteousness of your beliefs won’t save you”.

Then, one day, I read these words: “A good tree cannot bear bad fruit, nor can a bad tree bear good fruit” (7:18, NRSV). If this is true, what do I do with those who recite all the correct theology, but are, quite simply put, mean? They don’t seem to bear any fruit that reflect what Paul calls the ‘fruit of the spirit” (love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentlenself-controlf control). And what do I do with those who don’t openly profess Christianity but seem to be bearing “good tree” fruit all over the place? If love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control are indeed the fruit of the spirit, and among the fruit that Jesus is talking about here, are they not then the litmus test over and above anything that someone says they “believe”?

Jesus says, “you will know them by their fruit” (7:20, NRSV). Don’t look at their words, their books, what church they attend, what podcasts they listen to, or their Biblical knowledge; look at their fruit. What do they bear? What naturally flows out of who they are? Jesus’ words were are an extension of exactly what John the Baptist said in Matthew 3 the Messiah would be about: “Even now the ax is lying at the root of the trees; every tree, therefore, that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire” (3:10). We do not believe that one can earn their way into heaven. But what I beleive is universally true is that the fruit we bear, says something about what’s inside us.

But here’s the catch: If this is true, then the natural thing to do is to just start altering our behavior as a way of proving that I’m a “good tree”. We end up in this tiring rhythm of working endlessly to bear that “good fruit” without actually doing what Jesus says to do, which is to become a good tree. Jesus doesn’t tell us to bear good fruit. He says that if you’re a bad tree, you simply can’t bear good fruit. So don’t try to bear good fruit, but do start seeking to become a good tree. An apple tree will never bear oranges. A bad tree cannot bear good fruit. It can try, but it will fail. It may, through its efforts, bear something resembling good fruit, but upon tasting that fruit, you find out very quickly that it is rotten, spoiled, or unfinished.

Do you want to bear the fruit of the spirit of God? Or put another way, do you want to be a “Spirit of God tree”? Then plant yourself in the field of the spirit. Make room in your life for the spirit of God to work in you. Quit trying to justify yourself by exhibiting good fruit and open yourself up to becoming an entirely different kind of tree. The truth is that an apple tree can never become an orange tree. But by the grace of God, we can become new creations.

So Jesus has just gone through a rather deep, wide and long list of rhythms and ways to go about living. A lot of it is seriously hard stuff, requiring hard, internal work. But it is good. Oh, is it good stuff. Then we come to chapter 7.

Having said all that, he then says, “Do not judge, so that you may not be judged. For with the judgment you make you will be judged, and the measure you give will be the measure you get. Why do you see the speck in your neighbor’s eye, but do not notice the log in your own eye? Or how can you say to your neighbor, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ while the log is in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your neighbor’s eye.” After all those instructions on rightly ordered living, he commands us to be very careful about judgment. He doesn’t necessarily say that we should never judge, but he does give us a stark warning about how to do it, when we do it, and why we do it.

There is a time and place for judgement, but it seems that the time, whenever it is, follows our coming to terms with our own short-comings. This command here is not condoning any and all behaviors. Jesus is not giving us a first-century version of “to each his own”. What he is doing is completely reshaping the way we look at sinful behavior.

What Jesus is calling us to is seeing things rightly. The log in my eye inhibits me from seeing the speck clearly in my neighbor’s eye. My own sin gets in the way. When it is there, I don’t see the root issue in my neighbor. I see a glimpse, a shadow of it. I am in so much pain because of the log in my eye, that I can only feel better by focusing on the sliver in yours. So Jesus says, “work on yourself first. Take care of your own junk first.” And he says this not just because it’s fair, but because without doing it we simply can’t see clearly.

This resonates deeply within me. When I’ve come to terms with my own stuff and I am confident in my belovedness of God, I have no need to tear anyone else down by pointing out their stuff. So when I come to my neighbor, my motivation is actually to help them, not make myself feel better by pointing out their failures. I can be present to them, hear the whole story and see the big the picture. It’s as though I’m no longer seeing “sinful behavior”, but seeing a fellow beloved one.

But when I’ve got a log in my eye, I can’t be present, can’t hear the whole story and see the big picture. I’m too busy with the discomfort of my own log to be present- a log which clouds my vision. Upon working on ourselves first, Jesus says, “…And then you will see clearly”: Oh, to see clearly. To see God’s grace, to see God’s love, to see God’s creation in what I judge. This changes everything.

Here we get what I believe to be among Jesus’ most beautiful words, and many agree as these are often quoted. The problem is that we often overlook what leads up to them. I once heard a preacher say, “when you see the word ‘therefore’ in the Scriptures, you need to read what comes before it so that you know what the words are there for!” Well said. These words are beautiful, but let’s remember that they come immediately following “You cannot serve God and wealth.” It’s in that context that Jesus says this.

I have mixed feelings about Eugene Peterson’s Message Bible (RIP, by the way). Sometimes I think he misses it. But most often I think he’s crafted a beautiful and important retelling of the Biblical story. But nowhere does he nail it more than the Sermon on the Mount. With that in mind, I will let the man I affectionally call “Uncle Eugene” finish this post, by simply publishing his translation of verses 24-34. Let this wash over you today…

You can’t worship two gods at once. Loving one god, you’ll end up hating the other. Adoration of one feeds contempt for the other. You can’t worship God and Money both.

If you decide for God, living a life of God-worship, it follows that you don’t fuss about what’s on the table at mealtimes or whether the clothes in your closet are in fashion. There is far more to your life than the food you put in your stomach, more to your outer appearance than the clothes you hang on your body. Look at the birds, free and unfettered, not tied down to a job description, careless in the care of God. And you count far more to him than birds.

Has anyone by fussing in front of the mirror ever gotten taller by so much as an inch? All this time and money wasted on fashion—do you think it makes that much difference? Instead of looking at the fashions, walk out into the fields and look at the wildflowers. They never primp or shop, but have you ever seen color and design quite like it? The ten best-dressed men and women in the country look shabby alongside them.

If God gives such attention to the appearance of wildflowers—most of which are never even seen—don’t you think he’ll attend to you, take pride in you, do his best for you? What I’m trying to do here is to get you to relax, to not be so preoccupied with getting, so you can respond to God’s giving. People who don’t know God and the way he works fuss over these things, but you know both God and how he works. Steep your life in God-reality, God-initiative, God-provisions. Don’t worry about missing out. You’ll find all your everyday human concerns will be met.

“Give your entire attention to what God is doing right now, and don’t get worked up about what may or may not happen tomorrow. God will help you deal with whatever hard things come up when the time comes.

In my opinion, this is the foundational passage on money in the scriptures. Behind it is the over-arching message that our money is merely a resource given to us by God to partake with God in affecting God’s will on earth as it is in heaven. What we “treasure” and “store” up is what we value. It’s as though Jesus is saying “do not value things that are of the world, but value that which belongs in heaven”. And the truly piercing word comes when he says, “where your treasure is there your heart will be also” (v. 21, NRSV).

Our values are determined by how we spend our time and money. In my personal life, I can say I value one thing, but how I actually spend money will either confirm or refute that. If I say that feeding the hungry is important to me, but more of my resources go towards watching all the less than mediocre Twins baseball at Target Field than efforts to fight poverty and hunger, then it logically follows that more of my treasure is going towards less than mediocre Twins baseball at Target Field than it is in efforts to combat poverty, and, therefore that is where my heart is.

The connection, I believe, between what we treasure and how we spend our money is that where I spend my money is essentially where I store it. By spending money at Target Field, I am storing it there. That is not to say that I should never go to Target Field to watch all the less than mediocre Twins baseball. God gives us certain delights in life that are not necessarily holy, but are good things. And it is a right and good thing to enjoy them, but the degree to which we do says something about what we treasure. When Jesus says, “where your treasure is, there your heart will be also” it should give us great pause. These are big words.

The same goes for my calendar. Just as I can look at my checkbook to determine what I truly value, I believe I can do the same with my calendar. How I spend my time, says something about what I value or treasure. If I say I treasure my family, yet little to none of my time is spent with them, then it is hard to argue that I do indeed value them. That being said, the time one spends at work is indeed time spent on one’s family in that it is what provides a roof, food and clothes for them, but, as with our checkbooks, we must look at our calendars as an indicator of what we treasure.

All of this is to say that whether it’s our money or our time, we can’t apply blanket formulas or rigid percentages that determine what is balanced or right, because everyone’s context and life is different. I think Jesus would reject that kind of formulaic thinking or otherwise, he would have given us a generalized formula. He doesn’t give us a formula. He gives a principle: “Where your treasure is there your heart will be also”. He leaves it up to us to determine what that balance is. He throws the idea out there and then it’s up to us to honestly discern where our treasures are. He imposes no outside governing force to do that for us.

And this is evident in the central portion of this passage: “The eye is the lamp of the body. So if your eye is healthy, your whole body will be full of light.” This is a strange phrase for us in 21st century America. This phrase is actually a first-century idiom. To have a good eye was to have a generous eye. If your eyes were “good” it meant that you see things well, and therefore know how to respond. One with a “good” eye sees poverty, oppression, suffering, and despair well enough that it can’t not give toward healing it. It’s as though, when it comes to our money, Jesus is saying to us, “What do you see? What are you looking at? As you go through your life and this world, what does your eye look toward? Through what lens do you see things?” How we see things determines how we live, how we spend our time and money, and ultimately what we give ourselves to. And, as Jesus says here, you can’t give yourself to two masters…

Fasting. is this even relevant? do we even do this anymore outside of some the prescription for it in some new hip diet? Why don’t we fast? There are many reasons, I’m sure, but one reason I think we don’t fast in our culture is our insatiable addiction to productivity and busyness. You see, fasting requires a high degree of intention and of slowing our pace down. It means that I’m not going to work a 10-12 hour day with wall-to-wall meetings, race the kids off to play practice, clean the house, manicure the lawn, etc. If I do all those things and fast, I very well could pass out.

I did that once. In the campus ministry I was a part of in college it was in vogue to do a fast every now and then. So my small group decided we would do it. More so then than now, I had a body type where fasting is a bit risky. I needed food about every four hours or I would get light headed, dizzy, and… well… really crabby. But fasting was the truly “spiritual” thing to do so I thought I better do it.

“Just trust God” I was told. That is good advice, but the lessoned I learned was that while trusting God is important, honoring the fast by altering your daily routine is a key part of trusting God. It’s hard to trust God when you’re not seeking God. So I fasted. I got up, hopped on the campus express bus from South Minneapolis to Coffman Union. I went to my classes, ran through my day as I always do, and didn’t eat. I decided to go home when my last class was over and take a nap before rehearsal that night. By the time I got home, the world was spinning. I walked upstairs to get to my bed, and what must have been an hour or so later I woke up on those stairs. I was cold, shaky, trembling and hungry. I mowed down an entire box of Eggo Waffles. Just like Jesus would have wanted.

To fast in a safe and well intentioned way means we also need to stop, and stopping is something completely lost on our culture. To fast in such a way that you might actually encounter God would mean slowing down, turning off the Netflix, and social media feeds, staying home, moving slowly, and basically being what the world would call “unproductive”. To take a day to fast would result in a day where I “didn’t get anything done”, or at least didn’t get “enough” done. By and large, we don’t know how to do that in our culture. So we keep moving at our relentless pace, a pace that I believe is choking us to death.

I think the hardest part about a fast for many in our culture would not be the discomfort of the hunger and the struggle of controlling the cravings for food, but the slowing your life down that is required in order to do it wisely and intentionally- in order to actually seek after God. The call to a fast is not just a call to a sacrifice of food. It is also a call to a sacrifice of productivity. The purpose of the fast is not as much self-denial as it is an encounter with God. You can fast all you want, but if you don’t slow your pace, you will, I believe, miss God. So if you’re planning to fast, don’t rush into it; because the reality is that a well-intentioned fast is quite slow.

Ok, so we’re not quite getting to the money talk. Matthew opens chapter 6 with Jesus talking about money, then shifts into prayer and fasting, and then he’ll come back to money. All of this is connected. It all has to do with this idea of our faith being something organic and authentic within us. There should be no sense of “show” in the living out of our faith. So give in secret and pray in secret. Get your faith in God aligned properly.

And it’s in this that Jesus gives us this prayer which is still part of the Church today. We pray it every Sunday in our church, and I think it’s beautiful that it is still prayed in unison in churches across the globe. For while we call it “The Lord’s Prayer”, there is also a way in which it’s actually “The Church’s Prayer”. It is the prayer of and for the Church, of and for the people. We come together and we pray “Our Father…”. And we pray “Lead us not into temptation” and “Deliver us from evil…” The prayer is full of “us’s” and “we’s”. It’s about the community.

It’s about the community living in authentic relationships with God and one another. It recognizes that we do not always do this well, and calls us to seek out and to give forgiveness. It calls us to be a kind of people not concerned with our own personal gain, security, and well being, but concerned with the whole. It’s a “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts” kind of prayer. It is to say that if we want to be a people in right relationship with God, we must be in right relationship with each other and vice-versa.

I have said many times that the Christian faith is not one that is “personal”, but it is communal. This faith cannot be done without human relationships. It is a shared faith. The big question for us, and one that I think is at the heart of the decline of the church in America is “how do we live a truly communal faith in a culture that celebrates and even demands individualism?”